CONSULT YOUR INNER CRITIC ~ Balance Opposing Subselves Within You Through Voice Dialogue
A Do-It-Yourself or Do-It-With-Partners Experiential Questionnaire
By Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D.
Dean, School of Counseling & Tantra
From TANTRA FOR ALL CHAKRAS by Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D., Dean, School of Tantra, and Janet Kira Lessin, CEO, Aquarian Media.
WATCH THE VIDEOS:
- The Power of Voice Dialogue
- Voice Dialogue and the Inner Critic with Laura Fierro, MCC
- Learn More About This Method
Explore how Voice Dialogue helps you embrace and balance the opposing subselves within you.
MEET YOUR INNER CRITIC
A voice in your mind criticizes you. It complains about what you do and think. Like most, your Inner Critic worries about how you appear to others.
You created this Critic when you were small. As a child, you whispered to yourself how to act so your parents wouldn’t hurt you emotionally or physically. Those whispers became your Critic. Your Critic told you to control your instincts to get along with people.
To this day, the Critic fears your instinctual impulses will get you into trouble. To protect you from your instincts and others, the Critic says, “Watch what you do before other people do.”
You can’t get rid of your Critic. Don’t even try. But if you let it dominate your consciousness, its constant harping on what’s wrong will get you down.
Fortunately, you don’t have to suffer while your Critic nags. Instead, dialogue with your Critic, preferably aloud.
DIALOGUE WITH YOUR INNER CRITIC
Ask the voice that criticizes you what it wants and why.
Ask your internal critical voice how it guarded the Child within you and how it protected your Inner Child from other people’s judgments and the voices of other subpersonalities, such as your Inner Patriarch.
Find out how hard the Critic has worked for you all these years. Appreciate it.
Ask your Critic for suggestions on how to accept and safely express your instinctual energies. The Critic can help you find appropriate ways to express your instincts through art, sports, dance, drama, breathwork, or therapy.
LISTEN TO YOUR INNER CHILD
Then, listen to the Inner Child your Critic has been protecting.
Meet your Inner Child’s needs from a centered, aware Ego position. As you better meet the Child’s needs, your Critic will ease up on you.
Hear what your Child wants, needs, and likes.
Listen to what hurts your Child. Hear whom the Child fears and likes.
Tell the Child:
“I’ll decide what to do based on what you say, as well as what the Critic, other voices, and the overall situation require.”
Tell the Child that sometimes you’ll insist that it learn to take risks.
USE YOUR CRITIC TO FOCUS YOURSELF
Your Critic is one of your most intelligent voices. It gathers facts and analyzes them. It helps you think clearly, figures out why you and other people do things, and shows you how you affect others.
As you make friends with your Critic, invite it to review your work.
Your Critic can learn to give nonjudgmental critiques and show you how to do things better.
Your Critic can help you pay attention, teach you patience, and encourage you to attend wholeheartedly to details.
Consult your Critic, but don’t let it run you.
Develop Selfish and Impersonal inner voices to balance the Critic’s voice.
Keep the Critic in its place as only one—a very valuable one, but only one—of your inner voices.
Your Critic is the voice that, when honored by your Aware Ego, can give you objectivity, a stick-to-it attitude, faith in yourself, and strength in your conscience.
DO-IT-YOURSELF VOICE DIALOGUE CENTERING EXERCISE
Discover, Experience, and Balance Your Inner Subpersonalities
In this exercise, you’ll identify alternate personalities, or subselves, within you. You’ll change which chair you sit in as you take turns speaking from each inner voice you evoke.
Each chair represents a different position or subself. By physically moving between chairs, you can experience the perspectives, feelings, and energies of your inner voices while maintaining your capacity to return to your centered, aware position.
Step 1: Prepare Your Space
Arrange several chairs in a quiet space where you can speak freely without interruption.
Designate one chair as your Center, the position from which you’ll listen to and consider your inner voices.
Leave enough room to stand comfortably when you enter your Fair Witness position later in the exercise.
Step 2: Center Yourself
Sit in your Center chair.
This is the place from which you’ll hear your inner voices and consider their perspectives.
Take a few moments to become aware of yourself in this centered position.
Step 3: Identify Your Active Inner Voices
From your Center chair, talk about the voices that have been active in you lately, such as your Intellect, Critic, Pleaser, and Pusher.
Identify the voices you show the world and those you feel inside.
Notice which voices dominate your daily life and which remain in the background.
Step 4: Choose a Public Voice
Choose one of your public voices and describe what this voice is like and what it does for you.
Consider how it helps you function in the world, relate to other people, and meet your responsibilities.
Step 5: Embody a Subself Your Inner Critic Criticizes
Move to a different chair.
In this chair, embody one of the subselves your Inner Critic criticizes.
Speaking as that subself:
a) Say who you are.
b) Describe what you do for the whole person of whom you are a part.
Allow yourself to speak from this voice’s perspective rather than analyzing or judging it from your Center.
Step 6: Explore the History of This Subself
Continue speaking as the subself your Inner Critic criticizes.
Describe:
a) When and how you first emerged in your person’s life.
b) How you came to express yourself fully.
c) Your subsequent history as this subself.
Explore how your role developed and changed throughout the person’s life.
Step 7: Discover How This Voice Protects You
Speaking as this voice, explain how you protect the vulnerable subselves within your person.
Describe the situations in which you become active and what you seek to accomplish.
Step 8: Acknowledge This Subself’s Contributions
Describe the contributions you make to the whole person.
Explain what you’d like to be acknowledged and appreciated for.
Give this voice an opportunity to express its value without interference from the Inner Critic or other voices.
Step 9: Return to Your Center
Return to your Center chair.
Reflect on what you heard and experienced.
Repeat the dialogue procedure with each of the other voices your Critic protects.
Move to a separate chair for each voice, allowing each subself to express its unique perspective, history, purpose, and contributions.
Step 10: Enter Your Fair Witness Position
Stand up.
Standing is your FAIR WITNESS position.
From this position, contemplate and summarize what your subselves have said.
As your person’s Fair Witness, observe impartially, without any need to decide anything.
Feel the energy of each subself you embodied while sitting in its chair and speaking from its perspective.
Allow yourself to appreciate the distinctions among these inner voices without favoring or rejecting any of them.
Step 11: Return to Your Discerning Center (Aware Ego)
Return to your Center chair, your Discerning Center or Aware Ego position.
From here, allow yourself to feel and appreciate all the voices you embody simultaneously.
Recognize that each voice offers a perspective, but none needs to control your entire personality.
Feel confident in your ability to make informed choices from this centered position, considering all your perspectives.
Your Aware Ego can listen to every voice, appreciate its contributions, and decide how to respond.
HONOR YOUR CRITIC WITHOUT LETTING IT CONTROL YOU
Your Inner Critic has worked for you throughout your life. It learned to protect you, guide you, analyze situations, and anticipate difficulties.
When you honor its contributions without surrendering control to it, you can transform your relationship with this powerful inner voice.
Listen to your Critic. Appreciate its intelligence. Invite its observations and suggestions.
Then listen to your Inner Child and the other subselves that make up your inner world.
Let your Aware Ego make the final decisions, informed by all your voices rather than ruled by any single one.
CONTINUE EXPLORING VOICE DIALOGUE
Videos and additional resources:
The Power of Voice Dialogue
https://youtu.be/3GYzUTCGW6U
Voice Dialogue and the Inner Critic with Laura Fierro, MCC
https://youtu.be/P7p5_ZpIN_s
More on embracing opposites within yourself:
https://wp.me/p1TVCy-5mW
From TANTRA FOR ALL CHAKRAS by Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D., and Janet Kira Lessin.
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